Heroic failures: The Great British take-off (and crash landing)

After three months of development, the
Beagle 2 rover was launched towards Mars in 2003 to search for
signs of life on the Red Planet. Loaded up with cameras,
spectrometers and, bizarrely, a Damien Hirst painting, Beagle
reached Mars on 19 December 2003. The rover was released from its
mothership and was due to land on the surface on 25 December and
send a message back to base saying it had landed. The message never
came. Despite many attempts to communicate with the probe, all
attempts to pick up the signal failed. It was a £50 million heroic
failure. 10 years on, Wired.co.uk celebrates British heroic
failures, noble non-performances and bold breakdowns.

The Konix Multi-System
Having started life as a high-end joystick maker, in 1988 Konix
planned to launch a shape-shifting
console that could be a steering wheel, motorcycle handlebars
and an aircraft yolk. The Konix Multi-System would also have
add-ons that would involve pedals, helicopter control, a keyboard,
exercise bike and a hydraulic chair. It would have 256K RAM and a
3.5-inch disk drive. Having planned to launch in summer 1989, the
development was plagued by communication problems between Konix and
its partners. The hardware was changed, which in turn affected the
software development tools and led to a lack of games. Konix had,
somewhat stupidly, sold off its profitable joystick business in
order to fund the Multi-System; the console was abandoned when the
money ran out. Its only public appearance was at the 1989 PCW show
in Earls Court, where the "Power Chair" prototype was demoed, sadly
without any games.

Sinclair C5 British
inventor Clive Sinclair's first electric vehicle was billed as "a
revolution in personal transport" when it launched in January 1985.
It was essentially a battery-powered single seater with a 250 watt
motor and a white plastic body. It could be purchased by mail order
for £399. The C5 could be steered using handlebars between the thighs and
brakes operated much like those on a bicycle. It had a top speed of
15MPG, but required pedal assist up steep hills and to get the
vehicle started. Sinclair managed to attract investment from the
Welsh Development Agency and Hoover to produce the vehicles at a
factory in Wales, based on projections of sales of 200-300,000 per
year. Despite spending £3 million on a launch advertising campaign,
the C5 was criticised for being unsafe -- it was so low to the
ground that it was very hard to see in traffic, had a large turning
circle and forced drivers to inhale exhaust fumes from other
vehicles. Just 20,000 of the machines were sold. 10 months after
launch, Sinclair Vehicles went into receivership and Sinclair lost
around £8.6 million.

Amstrad Em@iler Plus It
was March 2000 and Sir Alan Sugar was convinced that the latest Amstrad
product would sell as well as the company's word processors.
The Emailer Plus was a telephone that allowed you to also, get
this, send an email on a pay-as-you-use basis. It could also
display adverts on the phone's 22cm screen, and take a cut of the
12p cost (!) of sending and receiving an email. Had it been 1995,
it would have been revolutionary. Sadly, it wasn't. It was launched
with a glittering fanfair and was heralded as an "electronic
billboard" that would be embedded in people's homes. On launch day,
Amstrad shared dropped by 17 percent, but this didn't phase Sugar;
the same had happened when he launched the incredibly popular CPC
464 word processor. In Sugar's view, the "City scribblers" had got
it wrong and would eat their words when the first million units
were installed in British homes by 2002. By September 2003, just
255,000 units had been sold and Amstrad's share price had plummeted
to new depths. Worst of all, the official name for the product
replaced the letter "a" in Emailer with an "@".

De Havilland DH 106 Comet
The Comet was
the first production commercial jetliner, which first flew in July
1949, before having its commercial debut in 1952. It featured four
turbojet engines buried in the wings, square windows and a
pressurised cabin that offered a relatively quiet, comfortable
journey. A year after launch, Comets started to suffer problems.
One plane disintegrated as it left Calcutta during a thunderstorm
-- investigators blamed the bad weather. Eight months later a
second plane blew up in clear skies off the coast of Italy. Three
months later a third Comet exploded over the Mediterranean and the
fleet was grounded. Parts of the last plane's wreckage suggested
there had been a structural failure. To test this theory, an entire
plane was put into an underwater testing vessel, where they varied
the cabin pressure hydraulically while flexing the winds. After
pressurising and depressurising the cabin more than 3,000 times, a
crack appeared near a cabin window and then quickly spread. The
square window design allowed for stresses to concentrate in the
corners, which, combined with rivets (the windows were designed to
be installed using rivets AND glue, but only rivets were used),
lead to catastrophic structural failure. The Comet was extensively
redesigned (complete with oval windows) but sales never fully
recovered.